


The Decent into Oblivion

by not_a_baby_unicorn



Series: Johnlock One-Shots and Other Mythical Beasts [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Based on a Poem, Death, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, PTSD, Post-Reichenbach, Post-Season/Series 02, Sherlock Actually Died, Sikenlock, Sorry Not Sorry, voices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-09
Packaged: 2018-03-11 09:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3321656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_a_baby_unicorn/pseuds/not_a_baby_unicorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sat on his dead lover’s bed and watched Greg try to rationally explain the purpose of confiscating his gun and sweating nervously whenever he came close to sharp objects, even the table knife that he used to eat dinner. As if he would try to finish everything on the eyes of his friend. He’d learnt the hard way that that was not the right approach to such things.  He lay on Sherlock’s bedroom floor and traced patterns into the grooves of the hardwood floor, imaging the story behind every scuff and scratch. He’d never hear any of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Decent into Oblivion

**Author's Note:**

> “You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.”  
> ― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

It didn’t happen often.

Some days, some beautiful, beautiful days, it would. On those days every single thing, however futile, had meaning. Every stranger was an enigma, every single fleeting gaze and touch one of a lover.  On those days, he could see him ubiquitously. In that cerulean-eyed stranger he saw on the train. That bright curly-haired woman who smiled at him in the café. It was torture. Madness.

After some time, he began to hear his voice. It repeated itself over and over, like a broken record, the same words being filtered through again and again. The voice in his head wouldn’t let him sleep. So he didn’t. For days on end, in a half-conscious wake, the voice spoke nearly all the time, firing misguided deductions, insulting him and people who had long left the room.   

He didn’t eat much. Greg visited often. Everybody seemed to visit often now, John noted. Out of guilt, out of grief, maybe. Out of pity, mostly. He thought he received enough mercy when he was discharged from Her Majesty’s service, but this was worse. Words of condolence, shame, anger- nothing would bring him back. No more midnight cases, no more chaotic kisses in the dark of an alleyway, no more slow nights when time flowed like the moonlight rolling across their entwined bodies; no more laughs and tears and anger, all flowing out the wrong way, all escaping the grasp of his memory faster than the diminishing sunlight outside.

He was gone; out of his life, their life. There was nothing to keep his memory alive except for a handful of people, of which the majority had laid him out on a plate for death to take.  And death never gave back offerings from the mortal world, however much people cried and pleaded and bargained.

But that didn’t stop him from trying. Tears of bitter rage and guilt and blame, the feeling of desperation. The quiet whispering of the gun, to bring about The End, so irresistible at this moment. Suffering while crouching in a corner sobbing, rocking back and forth in annihilation of every sweet breath shared, so precious at that moment of unknowing. In John’s case, at least. Sherlock knew when The End would come. He chose the date.

A sob racks through his body. A quiet gasp for air. A demand from his body.  A painful reminder of the cause.

Death.  The personification of the power that destroys life, often represented in art and literature as a skeleton or an old man holding a scythe.

Truthfully, the complete stop of natural processes in an organism.

John felt dead, all his life processes stopping. Every attempt at looking after himself was now a way to fill the time, to stop the voice from occupying what was left of his sanity.

He sat on his dead lover’s bed and watched Greg try to rationally explain the purpose of confiscating his gun and sweating nervously whenever he came close to sharp objects, even the table knife that he used to eat dinner. As if he would try to finish everything on the eyes of his friend. He’d learnt the hard way that that was not the right approach to such things.  He lay on Sherlock’s bedroom floor and traced patterns into the grooves of the hardwood floor, imaging the story behind every scuff and scratch. He’d never hear any of them.

Greg came and went. Mrs. Hudson wept behind closed doors. Mycroft didn’t show, but John noticed the absence of cameras around the flat. Their flat. The one they shared, the one they lived in together. The one in which they loved the other for the first time, selfishly grabbing for every inch of skin as stars rose in the sky. The same stars that saw the rise and fall of empires now witnessed the undoing of John Watson- A man named Sherlock Holmes, pronounced dead at the scene of his suicide.

It wouldn’t be long before the same stars would bear witness to the end of another life, one so closely intertwined with the great detective’s that it couldn’t abide an existence without him.

The calendar falls from the wall of the master bedroom, a single red cross marking a date. It is the anniversary of a meeting. Soon, it will be the marking of a passing of another great man.    

**Author's Note:**

> This was loosely based on the extract from the work of Richard Siken:  
> "Eventually something you love is going to be taken away from you. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.” 
> 
>  
> 
> As you may have guessed, feedback appreciated greatly :D


End file.
